Is foreign aid just money down the drain?

The Government’s programmes for developing countries sound impressive - but
many of its claims start to unravel under scrutiny

Once again last week, the Department for International Development (DFID) found itself fighting a small crisis in Africa. After The Sunday Telegraph revealed that £480,000 of British aid had been stolen by al‑Shabaab, the Somali branch of al‑Qaeda, emergency supplies of ministers had to be rushed into the trouble zone (BBC Radio 4’s Today programme and the pages of the London Evening Standard).

Britain was sending £80 million a year to Somalia to “shape the world we want and to reap the rewards”, insisted the Development Secretary, Justine Greening. “Either we help foreign governments to deal with terrorists abroad, or we do nothing and face a future dealing with them at home or even on foreign battlefields.”

In the days that followed, however, DFID had trouble shaping even its story about the missing aid. Ms Greening said that the goods were “destroyed”, and her officials told reporters that they had been burnt by al-Shabaab in a single incident in November 2011.

But DFID’s own annual report, which described the loss, made no mention of any fire or destruction, speaking instead of multiple “confiscations” from multiple “offices” and “warehouses” over a three-month period from November to February. Late on Friday, after two days of asking, DFID admitted that its claim about the destruction was merely a “judgment, based on similar al-Shabaab incidents”, and declined to answer further questions about exactly what took place; where, when or how often it happened; how the department learnt of its loss; or whether there were any witnesses.

Three days after the theft story broke, DFID’s arguments suffered a more serious blow. Little reported in Britain, Médecins Sans Frontières, the famously tough international aid agency and one of the tiny few to have stayed in Somalia throughout the horrors of the past two decades, announced that it was closing its operation and pulling out all 1,500 of its staff on security grounds.

Dr Unni Karunakara, MSF’s president, said the “final straw” for the charity was discovering that several of Somalia’s own various official authorities had “actively supported or tacitly approved attacks, killings and abductions of humanitarian workers in Somalia”, adding: “It’s almost like a frog in boiling water. I think over the last 22 years we have accepted higher levels of risk and somehow absolved it and we’ve just reached our limit.” When Ms Greening talked about the Somali government dealing with terrorists, this probably wasn’t what she had in mind.

But Somalia is far from the only place where DFID’s record can be questioned. To answer critics of its growing budget – up by 35 per cent, even as most other budgets are being cut – the department’s latest annual report lists a series of spectacular, almost Soviet-style achievements, in what it calls DFID’s “year of significant delivery”.

By April 2013, according to the report, 19.6 million people had been given “access to a water, sanitation or hygiene intervention” thanks to DFID support – some of it direct, most of it channelled through multilateral agencies such as the EU. Almost six million new people got one or more of these things last year alone, the report claims – an incredible 112,000 new people every week, a 42 per cent rise in a single year. If real, it is a huge achievement; lack of safe drinking water and sewerage are two of the most basic causes of death and disease. But is it real?

It turns out that the hygiene and sewerage figure is just one of a number of DFID statistics that may be faintly smelly. Under pressure to justify its £11 billion budget, the department’s claims appear unreliable across a whole number of key policy areas. One problem, of course, is that it is often not enough simply to put in latrines, sewers or pumping stations. Tanks must be regularly emptied, pipes regularly repaired, pumps regularly refuelled. DFID’s statistics used to recognise this, counting only the number of people given “sustainable” access to better water or sanitation. Now, however, the definition used to produce the 19.6 million figure appears to have been changed. It no longer, by its own admission, includes any measure of “whether the water sources remain in use after a given period of time”. That might help bump up DFID’s numbers, but it is not so good for the Third World.

Earlier this year, the EU’s spending watchdog, the Court of Auditors, examined Brussels’ programme for water and sanitary improvements, which has received large amounts of DFID funding. Of the 23 major projects they looked at, which are meant to help many millions of people, only 10 were properly maintained and still operating; only four were covering enough of their running costs to ensure their future survival; and just two did regular checks to make sure the water they produced was actually fit for human consumption.

Lynne Featherstone, the DFID minister, now admits there was “culpable waste” in the project. Similar problems were found in a DFID-led programme in Sudan, though DFID insists that none have been identified with its other direct projects, saying permanent improvements have been delivered for the “vast majority” of its 19.6 million beneficiaries. For all the impressive numbers pumped out by DFID, sanitation is one of the development goals most seriously off track. Thanks to urbanisation and population growth, there are actually more people now without access to improved sanitation than there were 20 years ago.

Then there’s the tricky matter of what constitutes a “hygiene intervention”. This, it turns out, need not include any actual physical measures at all, simply “communication, social mobilisation, community participation, social marketing and advocacy to bring about behaviour change”. DFID insists this means more than just putting up notices asking people to wash their hands – but in its Sudan programme it seemed to include just that, along with the distribution of “hygiene kits and soap”. The definition adds: “Understanding whether hygiene promotion has in fact led to behaviour change… is not required.”

DFID’s education number – an impressive-sounding 5.87 million children “supported” in primary education a year – also starts to unravel under scrutiny. It’s a measure, it transpires, only of “enrolment”, not actual attendance, teaching or learning. In other words, you can turn up once, never come back and still be counted as a pupil “supported” in education by British taxpayers.

It’s often not the kids’ fault. They want to learn. But as a report by the official aid watchdog, the Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI), into a DFID-funded, Unicef-run education programme in northern Nigeria found, many of the supposed “schools” in which they are enrolled are “without windows, desks, chairs, adequate roofing, toilet facilities and sources of water”.

When the researchers asked a group of girls about the state of their school, “they laughed”, the report said. “One said that, as could be seen, the corner of their classroom had fallen in, the sky was exposed through part of the roof and there were no windows or doors.”

In one Nigerian state covered by the programme, “it was not difficult to find rural schools where on average half the teachers had not worked the previous month… There is little evidence to indicate that substantial and sustainable changes… have been made to teacher performance and school infrastructure.” Yet this programme, GEP 2, has cost British taxpayers £41 million, with a further £103 million to come.

Across the top of DFID’s own official document about the programme, presumably not meant for public consumption but inadvertently published anyway, a civil servant has written: “Ian – activities log template a bit sparse. Unicef to fill this in.” GEP 2 has been going since 2004, so it might be a little late for that.

The entire basis of even the enrolment number, by the way, is almost certainly false. DFID takes it from official statistics for overall enrolment issued by the governments concerned, then divides it by the share of funding it provides for education in that country. That assumes two things: that the benefit DFID aid brings is always exactly proportional to the amount it has paid – and also that the overall statistics issued by countries such as Nigeria are reliable. In fact, as the ICAI report found, they can go up or down by as much as 40 per cent in a single year.

Another even more striking DFID achievement is the 30.3 million people “supported” to get “access to financial services”, such as microcredit – a soaraway increase of 18.7 million, or 161 per cent, in just one year. Once again, this is not quite what it seems. It includes not just “access made possible directly under DFID-supported programmes” but also “nationwide expansion in access to financial services resulting from the policy changes and improvements in the enabling environment made possible through DFID support”.

In Rwanda, the proportion of people with access to financial services has risen from below half to 72 per cent – a big success. But it hasn’t had much to do with DFID. Britain’s programme in the area, Access to Finance Rwanda, has been in existence since March 2010, spent £4.3 million and achieved, according to an official evaluation, virtually nothing. Its administration costs in 2011 made up 89 per cent of its budget.

The more you look at DFID, the more you realise that it is a last outpost of New Labour. Its spending on projects such as GEP 2, untroubled by eight years of failure, recalls the golden days of the London Underground PPP, the explosion in tax credits and other such boondoggles.

Actual progress towards its key policy targets, though not nil, is less than you might expect for the acceleration in spending. DFID works towards the seven Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) on schooling, on water, on child mortality and others. These, unlike the department’s own figures, are independently assessed. And as The Sunday Telegraph reported last week, only 31 per cent of the MDG targets in DFID’s enduring priority countries are assessed as “achieved or on track”, down from 38 per cent in 2010. Fifty-four per cent were “offtrack” or “severely offtrack”, up from 49 per cent in 2010.

The huge numbers claimed for “children supported” in primary education, “hygiene interventions” and the like are the Coalition equivalents of the last government’s claims about massively falling GP waiting times and massively rising GCSE A grades – not fake exactly, but faintly manufactured and suspect.

When the beneficiaries are in remote, sometimes dangerous corners of the developing world, rather than housing estates in Leicester, the figures are even more vulnerable to manipulation and error.